And now it's time for part two of our two part series on active and passive voice.

This is the last of the really advanced topics I'll be doing for a while.

We're going to get back to basics in the new year when we get a lot of new listeners,

so relish this one last chance to learn some hardcore grammar for a while.

Last week I said that to really understand passive voice, we need to know what active

voice is.

A common definition of active voice is that the verbs subject is performing the action.

Or in linguistic terms that this subject has the agent role.

Although this is often true by that definition sentences such as they suffered and died,

and something happened would incorrectly be classified as passive.

I spent the rest of that episode giving a more accurate definition of active voice,

and if you didn't catch last week's podcast you'll definitely want to listen to it before

you listen to this one.

Last week I talked about various semantic roles, including agent, patient, recipient,

and experiencer, and gave examples of verbs in the active voice whose subjects weren't agents.

Now once you know about active voice, the definition for passive voice is pretty simple.

It's a verb form that meets two requirements.

First, it must have a past participle, such as loved or given.

And second, its subject feels a different semantic role than in the active voice.

Some examples will show how this definition works.

Take the active voice clause, Steve loves Amy.

In this clause the subject Steve has the role of experiencer, he's the one who loves.

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